TEN YEARS ON AND THE LESSONS OF VICTORY

THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY of the fall of the Berlin Wall served as the background and inspiration for a July conference on the Cold War, sponsored by William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, the bible of modern, cheerful and wise conservatism.

Addressing the basic question of what the Soviets had done wrong and how we had won the Cold War, conference participants went back to WWII's Yalta Conference, where the problems began. At Yalta the Allies, in effect, agreed to let the Soviets keep whatever they might take in Eastern Europe. That formula led to the idea of containment--accepting rather than opposing a Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, even though that dominance was achieved by subversion, terrorism and force.

The proponents of containment were against communism, but they were not inclined to take up arms in opposition. Far better simply to wait for communism to collapse or "implode" and fall of its own weight. This philosophy expanded into the policy of dtente--the principal hope of which was that the systems of capitalism and communism would "converge" (another buzzword of the time) and coexist permanently. But to do that, we would have had to think of communism as just another system, ignoring its repression, its denial of human rights and its goal of world dominance.

Attachment to containment made us all but ignore Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 threat, "We will bury you." The more extreme believers in avoiding confrontation at all costs came to support "moral equivalence"--the idea that there was no moral difference between the foreign policies of the U.S. and those of the U.S.S.R. This concept was ultimately rejected when I debated it at the Oxford Union in 1984. The high-water mark for the defeatist ideas of no confrontation came with the adoption of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which bars any effective missile defense against nuclear weapons and rests on the mad doctrine that the only way we can be completely safe is to be completely vulnerable.

When President Reagan took office in 1981, the policies of containment, dtente and convergence were virtually abandoned. The President proclaimed the U.S.S.R. an Evil Empire that must be destroyed. Despite howls of outrage, he went further, calling for the U.S. to develop and deploy an effective missile defense against Soviet nuclear weapons.

How did we win when conventional wisdom said we would not? Victory stemmed from our defining a clear objective and advocating ceaselessly the means and policies necessary to achieve it. These included: Quickly regaining the deterrent strength of our woefully deficient military, especially strategic modernization; Repairing our foreign policy to maintain, seek and expand our alliances all over the world; Offering freedom from Soviet brutality, repression and the imposition of socialism, and giving each country the chance to live and be governed as it wished.

We had waited in vain for 69 years for the U.S.S.R. to collapse. It was time to try something different and better. We did. And it worked.

When the conference turned to discussing the future, most of the euphoria over past victories evaporated. After looking at the Clinton Administration's efforts in Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq and elsewhere, former Attorney General Ed Meese and former National Security Adviser Dick Allen summed it up well: "The people who were wrong in the past are the same people responsible today for foreign and defense policies that are jeopardizing our security." Other participants, including former Secretary of State and NATO Commander Al Haig, General Dick Walters and I, pointed out that our problems did not end with the Cold War and that the effectiveness of our armed forces has been weakened more severely during this Administration than in any other period. Former National Security Adviser Bill Clark emphasized that the moral underpinnings of Mr. Reagan's policies were always based on demonstrating the clear superiority of Western values and exposing the defects of the Soviet system.

So, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear there is still a need to study the decisions made and the actions taken that enabled us to win the Cold War, or we will find ourselves in a similar or worse situation.